Unrailed is an Overcooked-style controlled-chaos party game. You can play it alone, but I don't see why you'd ever want to. Your goal is to complete a rail line from your starting station to the next one. You do this every level with all sort of changing variables. All-in-all, Unrailed is a solid party game that provides ample fun though it does get much too 'samey' if you're someone attempting to play the game a bit seriously.

Each level begins in a biome, the starting biome is a wood or forest type, with your train at a station. You have to build new tracks one by one and lay them one by one to connect to the next station on the other end of the map. You have to collect wood by chopping trees and stone by mining rocks. One rock gives one stone, one tree gives one wood and it takes one wood and one stone to make one track. On your train is a wagon that hold raw materials and a wagon that crafts tracks. The gameplay loop consists of harvesting resources, crafting tracks and then laying tracks.

But in your way on the map are many obstacles. Typically there are forests or big rock formations you have to mine to clear space out for tracks to be lain. You'll need to plot your path in such a way that you don't trap yourself. You'll also need to build bridges and wooden apparatuses to cross ponds and lakes at times. There are NPC Bandits who will steal your stacked resources, animals who will get in your way or derail your journey. You have to navigate all of these things each level.

Every time you begin a level you are given a goal. If you achieve that goal you get an extra 'bolt.' You also get a bolt for completing the level at all. The bolts are used as currency to upgrade your train. New wagons with new mechanics or upgrades to your existing wagons so they can carry more or materials or craft materials more quickly. There is also a water tank on your train that you have to keep filled so it doesn't overheat. If you fail to keep the water tank filled, your train will light on fire and the fire will spread to other wagons. Flaming wagons no longer function. You have to fill the water tank with a bucket from water on the map, or if you're lucky rain will fill the bucket and water tank.

The levels are random seeds but you always progress through the biomes in the same way. Forest -> Desert -> Snow -> Volcano -> Space. Each biome has its own challenges. In the forest things are mostly simple but you will often have large forests and rock formations to mine through to make space. In the desert water is at a premium with less available water, less rain. The snow level is probably the worst of all of them with large snow pileups to move through that slow the player characters and obfuscate resources and tracks. Volcano and space are zany biomes with expert difficulty challenges that are themed.

The only way to progress from one biome to another is to upgrade the locomotive / the engine. Which costs 4 bolts. You will want to do this as the longer you stay in a given biome the faster the train will move (giving you less time to build tracks making things harder). The default game mode is an 'endless' mode that goes on, well, endlessly. If you lose you have to start from the beginning, though the game gives you an option to enable checkpoints. The first level of each biome becomes your checkpoint if you lose, giving you an incentive to jump to new biomes.

There are some other game modes, like a versus mode, that give the game a little variety but 90% of players will spend 90% of their time doing the default endless mode. And it is fun. But it does get a little repetitive. It's not quite the variety you get to see in the different Overcooked levels. It's a lot of same-same but different feel when the random seeds generate different levels in the same biomes. There's some RNG as to what wagons and wagon upgrades you get to choose from at the end of a level which can change your runs as well. Like and RNG shuffling roguelike experience you can get some runs that feel or actually are unwinnable. Which makes for some frustration but also keeps the game exciting.

It's fun. It's a good party game. Probably has diminishing returns, and feels very unceremonious when you fail. But you'll get some play out of it with your gaming group and you can always get some mileage out of it with new friends. We have put a sickening number of hours into it within the first two weeks of 2022 and I imagine we're approaching burnout on it now. But it'll always be in the gaming bucket that we pull from when looking to play something with friends or for something to fill two hours in a given evening. Thanks to its small install size it'll probably remain installed on our hard drives for the foreseeable future. Definitely recommend grabbing it when it's on sale for $5 or so

Most other reviews here talk about the fun factor, but let's talk about production value:

The dynamic lighting system breathes life into what might otherwise be over-simple graphics (although the intricacy of the voxels shines through, too). Single-player is made not only bearable, but genuinely fun in a way that is unique compared to the standard multiplayer experience, with the 'bot' system. I have only heard great things about how online matchmaking operates, but I can attest that private online games run very smoothly.

TL:DR, game is fun and good in ways you may not expect. it deserves your attention